Samsung announced that it has begun mass producing 1.8 inch solid state drives (SSD) at 64GB; the highest density SSD available today.

As you know SSD drives feature far greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives. SSD can also improve battery life by up to 20% in notebooks.

The 64GB SSD consists of 64 eight Gigabit (Gb) single-level cell flash memory chips. Use of 51nm process technology permits fabrication of much smaller components, with each chip having circuitry 1/2500th the width of a human hair. Samsung expects that sales of SSD units will increase at a rapid 270 percent pace industry-wide between now and 2010 to become the largest growth segment in the NAND flash industry.

This is actually the SSD drive I need to get my trusty IBM Thinkpad X40 to perform again. The bottle neck of that thin 12 inch notebook is the slow hard-drive. There are already 1.8 inch SSD drives on the market, but the prices are still a bit too high to refurbish older notebooks with them. The SAMSUNG 32GB 1.8 inch SSD sells for $529 on NewEgg.

Via this Samsung press-release.